The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure

318 Pages·2013·3.974 MB·English

by  Tristan Taormino, Constance Penley, Celine Parrenas Shimizu, Mireille Miller-Young

PRAISE FOR THE FEMINIST PORN BOOK
“ In terms both jarring and harrowing, women’s bodies became the terrain on
which the 2012 election was fought. That the choices, experiences, and con-
sequences of women’s sexual lives became fodder for such poorly informed
national ‘conversations’ is evidence of the pressing need for thoughtful, sex-
positive scholarship which centers on women’s sexual agency. The Feminist
Porn Book is just such a contribution, and I predict this volume is going to find
its way onto the bedside tables of several generations of American women. It
brings together academics, activists, and porn entrepreneurs who have a star-
tling array of interactions with pornography as an experience, a business, and
a field of inquiry. These essays are straightforward and informative in ways
that are unfortunately rare in the multidecade feminist struggle over porn. It’s
also fun and sometimes a bit naughty to read. The authors do not assume that
the porn industry as it exists is the one essential and only possible incarna-
tion of porn. Instead, they assume that when feminists engage, intervene in,
produce, and study pornography, they can radically alter its formations and
meanings. At the core of the book is the question: Can porn coexist with the
principles of feminism? No matter how one ultimately adjudicates this ques-
tion, The Feminist Porn Book leaves no doubt about the inherent value in the
inquiry itself.”
—Melissa Harris-Perry, host of MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry
“ This thrilling anthology brings together scholars, producers, and fans of
feminist pornography to define an emerging movement of gender and sexual
visionaries, working at the radically inclusive and egalitarian edges of sexual
representation. The authors explore an ever-widening range of body types, and
a proliferating variety of images, sensations, and feelings. They examine the
conditions of production as well as the politics of representation. They show
us the new feminist porn as deep play—challenging, exciting, and important.”
—Lisa Duggan, professor of American studies and gender
and sexuality studies, Department of Social and
Cultural Analysis, New York University
“ The Feminist Porn Book is a readable and smart must-have for any classroom
dealing with sexual representations.”
—Chuck Kleinhans, co-editor of JUMP CUT:
a review of contemporary media
“ The Feminist Porn Book finally brings the voices of porn stars and directors into
the room so they can speak for themselves. Part academic inquiry, part porn
star tell-all, part comprehensive history of the growing influence of women
in explicit cinema, The Feminist Porn Book is a brainy and fierce antidote to
simplistic antiporn arguments, a love letter to feminists who seize the means
of pornographic production and the academics who study them.”
—Carol Queen, founding director of the Center for Sex and Culture,
and author of Real LiveNude Girl: Chronicles of Sex-Positive Culture
“ To have writings from so many of the most important creators in feminist
porn in one anthology is wonderful. It captures the past, present, and future
pioneering of this important film genre.”
—Shine Louise Houston, director and CEO
of Pink and White Productions
“ This impressive volume of essays shows that thirty years after the feminist sex
wars first erupted, porn is still a hot topic for the women’s movement, and for
the scholarly study of gender and sexuality. The Feminist Porn Book brings
together a potent mix of perspectives from academics, activists, and sex indus-
try workers, while addressing dis/ability, transness, and race/ethnicity.”
—Susan Stryker, director of the Institute for
LGBT Studies, University of Arizona
“ Eloquent, smart, passionate, and engaging—each page of The Feminist Porn
Book offers a timely reminder of the continued importance of feminist inter-
ventions into the politics and production of pornography.”
—Carol Stabile, director of the Center for the
Study of Women in Society, University of Oregon
“ In this breakthrough collection, scholars, artists, and producers from across a
spectrum of identities serve up profound new insights on making, consuming,
and studying porn. This book advances my understanding of how porn works,
when it doesn’t, and why it matters. The short essay format makes this book
ideal for teaching, but it’s essential reading for anyone insterested in sexual
politics or contemporary culture.”
—Richard Fung, video artist and professor,
Ontario College of Art and Design

Published in 2013 by the Feminist Press
at the City University of New York
The Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406
New York, NY 10016
feministpress.org
Introduction copyright © 2012 by Tristan Taormino, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Constance
Penley, and Mireille Miller-Young
Selection and compilation copyright © 2012 by Tristan Taormino, Celine Parreñas Shimizu,
Constance Penley, and Mireille Miller-Young
Individual copyrights retained by contributors.
All rights reserved.
A version of “Out of Line: The Sexy Femmegimp Politics of Flaunting It!” copyright 2010 by
Loree Erickson first appeared in Sex Matters: The Sexuality and Society Reader, 3rd Ed., eds.
Mindy Stombler et al. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2010) 135–40. 
No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University
of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Second printing July 2013
Cover design by Herb Thornby, herbthornby.com
Text design by Drew Stevens
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The feminist porn book : the politics of producing pleasure /
edited by Tristan Taormino, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Constance Penley,
and Mireille Miller-Young.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-55861-818-3
1. Pornography—Political aspects. 2. Feminism. 3. Women—Sexual
behavior. 4. Sexual freedom. I. Taormino, Tristan, 1971–
HQ471.F45 2013
306.7—dc23
2012043903
Contents
Introduction: The Politics of Producing Pleasure 9
Constance Penley, Celine Parreñas Shimizu,
Mireille Miller-Young, and Tristan Taormino
PART I. MAKING PORN, DEBATING PORN
Porn Wars 23
Betty Dodson
The Birth of the Blue Movie Critic 32
Susie Bright
Emotional Truths and Thrilling Slide Shows:
The Resurgence of Antiporn Feminism 41
Clarissa Smith and Feona Attwood
“What’s a Nice Girl Like You . . . ” 58
Candida Royalle
My Decadent Decade: Ten Years of Making
and Debating Porn for Women 71
Ms. Naughty
From Text to Context: Feminist Porn and
the Making of a Market 79
Lynn Comella
PART II. WATCHING AND BEING WATCHED
A Question of Feminism 97
Sinnamon Love
Interventions: The Deviant and Defiant Art
of Black Women Porn Directors 105
Mireille Miller-Young
Fucking Feminism 121
Dylan Ryan
Queer Feminist Pigs: A Spectator’s Manifesta 130
Jane Ward
“Every time we fuck, we win”: The Public Sphere
of Queer, Feminist, and Lesbian Porn
as a (Safe) Space for Sexual Empowerment 140
Ingrid Ryberg
Where The Trans Women Aren’t: The Slow Inclusion
of Trans Women in Feminist and Queer Porn 155
Tobi Hill-Meyer
Imag(in)ing Possibilities: The Psychotherapeutic Potential
of Queer Pornography 164
Keiko Lane
PART III. DOING IT IN SCHOOL
“A Feminist Teaching Pornography?
That’s Like Scopes Teaching Evolution!” 179
Constance Penley
Cum Guzzling Anal Nurse Whore:
A Feminist Porn Star Manifesta 200
Lorelei Lee
Pornography: A Black Feminist
Woman Scholar’s Reconciliation 215
Ariane Cruz
Porn: An Effective Vehicle for Sexual
Role Modeling and Education 228
Nina Hartley
From “It Could Happen to Someone You Love”
to “Do You Speak Ass?”: Women and Discourses
of Sex Education in Erotic Film and Video 237
Kevin Heffernan
Calling the Shots: Feminist Porn in Theory and Practice 255
Tristan Taormino
Our Pornography 265
Christopher Daniel Zeischegg a.k.a. Danny Wylde
PART IV. NOW PLAYING: FEMINIST PORN
Uncategorized: Genderqueer Identity and Performance
in Independent and Mainstream Porn 273
Jiz Lee
Being Fatty D: Size, Beauty, and Embodiment
in the Adult Industry 279
April Flores
The Power of My Vagina 284
Buck Angel
Bound By Expectation: The Racialized Sexuality
of Porn Star Keni Styles 287
Celine Parreñas Shimizu
Knowing Dick: Penetration and the Pleasures
of Feminist Porn’s Trans Men 303
Bobby Noble
Out of Line: The Sexy Femmegimp Politics of Flaunting It! 320
Loree Erickson

Introduction: The Politics of Producing Pleasure
CONSTANCE PENLEY, CELINE PARREÑAS SHIMIZU,
MIREILLE MILLER-YOUNG, and TRISTAN TAORMINO
T
he Feminist Porn Book is the first collection to bring together writ-
ings by feminist porn producers and feminist porn scholars to
engage, challenge, and re-imagine pornography. As collaborating
editors of this volume, we are three porn professors and one porn direc-
tor who have had an energetic dialogue about feminist politics and por-
nography for years. In their criticism, feminist opponents of porn cast
pornography as a monolithic medium and industry and make sweep-
ing generalizations about its production, its workers, its consumers, and
its effects on society. These antiporn feminists respond to feminist por-
nographers and feminist porn professors in several ways. They accuse
us of deceiving ourselves and others about the nature of pornography;
they claim we fail to look critically at any porn and hold up all porn as
empowering. More typically, they simply dismiss out of hand our abil-
ity or authority to make it or study it. But The Feminist Porn Book offers
arguments, facts, and histories that cannot be summarily rejected, by
providing on-the-ground and well-researched accounts of the politics
of producing pleasure. Our agenda is twofold: to explore the emergence
and significance of a thriving feminist porn movement, and to gather
some of the best new feminist scholarship on pornography. By putting
our voices into conversation, this book sparks new thinking about the
richness and complexity of porn as a genre and an industry in a way that
helps us to appreciate the work that feminists in the porn industry are
doing, both in the mainstream and on its countercultural edges.
So to begin, we offer a broad definition of feminist porn, which will
be fleshed out, debated, and examined in the pieces that follow. As both
an established and emerging genre of pornography, feminist porn uses
sexually explicit imagery to contest and complicate dominant represen-
tations of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, ability, age, body type,
and other identity markers. It explores concepts of desire, agency, power,
beauty, and pleasure at their most confounding and difficult, including
pleasure within and across inequality, in the face of injustice, and against
the limits of gender hierarchy and both heteronormativity and homo-
10 INTRODUCTION
normativity. It seeks to unsettle conventional definitions of sex, and
expand the language of sex as an erotic activity, an expression of identity,
a power exchange, a cultural commodity, and even a new politics.
Feminist porn creates alternative images and develops its own aes-
thetics and iconography to expand established sexual norms and dis-
courses. It evolved out of and incorporates elements from the genres of
“porn for women,” “couples porn,” and lesbian porn as well as feminist
photography, performance art, and experimental filmmaking. It does
not assume a singular female viewer, but acknowledges multiple female
(and other) viewers with many different preferences. Feminist porn
makers emphasize the importance of their labor practices in production
and their treatment of performers/sex workers; in contrast to norms in
the mainstream sectors of the adult entertainment industry, they strive
to create a fair, safe, ethical, consensual work environment and often cre-
ate imagery through collaboration with their subjects. Ultimately, femi-
nist porn considers sexual representation—and its production—a site
for resistance, intervention, and change.
The concept of feminist porn is rooted in the 1980s—the height of the
feminist porn wars in the United States. The porn wars (also known as
the sex wars) emerged out of a debate between feminists about the role of
sexualized representation in society and grew into a full-scale divide that
has lasted over three decades. In the heyday of the women’s movement
in the United States, a broad-based, grassroots activist struggle over the
proliferation of misogynistic and violent representations in corporate
media was superceded by an effort focused specifically on legally ban-
ning the most explicit, and seemingly most sexist, media: pornography.
Employing Robin Morgan’s slogan, “Porn is the theory, rape is the prac-
tice,” antipornography feminists argued that pornography amounted to
the commodification of rape. As a group called Women Against Pornog-
raphy (WAP) began to organize in earnest to ban obscenity across the
nation, other feminists, such as Lisa Duggan, Nan D. Hunter, Kate Ellis,
and Carol Vance became vocal critics of what they viewed as WAP’s ill-
conceived collusion with a sexually conservative Reagan administration
and Christian Right, and their warping of feminist activism into a moral
hygiene or public decency movement. Regarding antiporn feminism as
a huge setback for the feminist struggle to empower women and sexual
minorities, an energetic community of sex worker and sex-radical activ-
ists joined anticensorship and sex-positive feminists to build the founda-
tion for the feminist porn movement.1
The years that led up to the feminist porn wars are often referred to as
the “golden age of porn,” a period from the early 1970s to the early 1980s,